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Illustrator How might I achieve a similar effect to this...


thePixelPixie

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This image looks a bit like an aurora borealis. I've done a cool tutorial on how to create aurora borealis in Illustrator, and it introduced me to the rather rad tilde key effect! But it doesn't really help me for this particular look. I need something similar but for creating a bunch of lines emanating up from a path. I suppose a mesh could do it, but I'm admittedly not very familiar with how to do such a thing. What I would really REALLY like to do is to create a look similar to this (with different colors) but with the borealis bottom edges (for lack of a better description) forming a treble clef. Thoughts?

Many thanks in advance. The help I received on my first question in the Photoshop section was GREAT and totally helped me NAIL the client's needs.

18fe1457961fafc5197a2bc7921b0aaf.jpg
 

Tom Mann

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The first thing that caught my attention is that it looks to me like there is a bit of Filter / Stylize / Wind effect running vertically at the top of the image, and a bit of half-tone lines running diagonally towards the bottom of the image.


Tom M
 

SPWA

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It looks a lot like a wav form, so you could try tracing one & play around with stretch & freeform then cut it into shape.

For the background behind the spikes, you could create the shape you need, then use scanlines overlay to cut out the lines, then with some opaque erasing & blurring, to achieve the grunginess.

Hope that's food for inspiration!
 

thePixelPixie

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Well, I got part way through it, and started checking how to typeset it decently, and the whole thing kind of fell apart then. The information about the concert is more important than the artwork itself. But this is as far as I got with it. I still like the direction it was going, but we ran out of time for me to keep playing with it.

flyer3-01.png

Posting what's being submitted to the board for approva;l in the morning on the next post. Apparently only one image per post? hmmm
 

thePixelPixie

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Hmmm...maybe you can only post an image every so often and not one right after another? I guess I'll do it in the morning.
 

IamSam

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thePixelPixie said:
Posting what's being submitted to the board for approva;l in the morning on the next post. Apparently only one image per post? hmmm
No, you can add as many attachments to a post as you wish.
 

Tom Mann

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Hi PPixie - I'm curious: Did you use PS's stylize/wind efffect to feather the top of the "aurora" like area, or did you use some other method?

Cheers,

Tom M
 

thePixelPixie

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Hi PPixie - I'm curious: Did you use PS's stylize/wind efffect to feather the top of the "aurora" like area, or did you use some other method?

Actually, I just used several different wave forms that I traced and would combine. I'd stretch each one, flip them, etc., etc. before applying the warp or mesh (I started with warp, but discovered that mesh was slightly easier to deal with). If I had gotten to finish it, I might have used some other effects to give it more motion and depth and stuff. For instance, I was going to have the borealis originating from the conductor's baton, and I probably would've added at least a touch of glow effects to things, maybe had a few music notes morphing from the flash coming from the baton (kind of Harry Potter-ish). In all likelihood, the vectors would have been imported into Photoshop to finish everything up. But here's the final piece. I'm pretty happy with it, even though it's way different from what I originally planned. It's funny how ideas can develop and morph and you wind up with something utterly different, but pretty cool nonetheless. I dig the artistic process.
final.jpg
 

Tom Mann

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I really like your final design -- very elegant and understated! Nice!

However, I still have a question about your previous design. I think I understand what you meant about using a few waveforms and then warping / transforming / compositing them / etc. them to get good shapes, the right degree of overlap between them, etc., but what I am specifically curious about is how you made all of those very narrow (few pixels wide) vertical lines. These have me puzzled. Were they already part of the waveforms that you found, or did you add them after the fact? If the latter, what method did you use to make them?

I circled some of them in red below:

flyer3-01-tjm01-ps01a-annotated-01_698px_wide.jpg

Thanks in advance.

Tom M
 

thePixelPixie

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It's literally just stretching the wave forms from what I had before I even applied the effects to them. For instance, here's one of the original wave forms I traced...
9a0b3d2701f28cbdd2d7101e97eb395b.png
Then I simply used a straight line on top and divided objects below. That gave me 2 virtually identical wave forms (I flipped the bottom one vertically so they were both going the same direction). And then I would resize vertically and horizontally and wind up with, for instance, a shape like this:
aurora-01.png
(a grouped pair of waves)

And then applied the transformations.

Does that explain it a little better? Happy to try to expand further if necessary.
 

Tom Mann

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Very cool!!! Got it now!

That was a great, innovative way to get the effect.

Thanks.

Tom M
 
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